| masraum |
03-15-2025 07:00 AM |
Years ago, I stumbled across a cheap screwdriver with a small set of 5-10 bits. I tried upgrade by purchasing a cheap version with a box with a bigger set of bits. The box and bits were an upgrade, but the original screwdriver's handle shape and build were better and more comfortable. The old screwdriver fit in the box, so that's the screwdriver that I use the most these days.
The last 2 tools that I used were my AC Hydraulic low profile high lift jack and my Esco jack stands, and my dad's old Craftsman ratchets and the Craftsman sockets my parents got me for my 16th birthday.
(related subject) Maybe we all need to buy a more modern hammer.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/25/1111041/the-man-who-reinvented-the-hammer/
excerpts from the article below
Quote:
After MIT, Schroder spent two years designing weapons for the US Navy before enrolling in a doctoral program in plasma physics at the University of Texas at Austin. As he was approaching his final year, he and his wife, Lisa, went to Walmart one day to run an errand. “Like a stereotypical guy, I walked into the tool section and I started looking at the hammers,” Schroder recalls. “I realized all the hammers were designed incorrectly. It became almost an obsession for me.”
What Schroder picked up on wasn’t the design of the tools, exactly, but the fact that the manufacturers were effectively broadcasting a flaw. “The labels of all the hammers said ‘We have a shock-*reduction grip’ or a ‘vibration-reducing grip’ and I would try it and it didn’t work,” he says. “They were saying: ‘This is not a solved problem.’ They just gave me the information I needed. Have you ever heard of a tire company that says ‘Our tires are round’?”
At the time, Schroder was taking another exacting class, this one on mechanics. The professor told students he planned to cover 14 weeks of the syllabus in a mere six weeks and focus on special topics in the remaining time. Many students were intimidated and dropped out, but Schroder stuck with it. (“It was the type of abuse I was used to at MIT,” he jokes, pointing to his brass rat. “So it was just fine.”) Somewhat fortuitously, one of those “special topics” was baseball bats.
Because Schroder was so consumed by the hammer vibration problem—another activity that involves the mechanics of swinging—he read books about the legendary Boston Red Sox batter Ted Williams to learn more. He interviewed carpenters. He spent a fair amount of time with a hammer in his hand. “I got to be pretty good at it myself. I was just hammering all the time,” he says. “I ended up losing part of my hearing because I was doing all this work on anvils.”
He developed tests to measure vibrations and crafted a “cyberglove” that would read them and upload the data into a computer program. After two years of data collection and analysis, he concluded that most attempts to improve hammers involved adding length and therefore weight. That causes fatigue and potentially exacerbates what is known as “hammer elbow” or lateral epicondylitis, a repetitive stress disorder that can plague construction workers.
Schroder determined that there was a “little spot in a hammer where there’s not much vibration”—the part of the handle most people would naturally grasp. He figured out that if you remove weight from the parts of the handle adjacent to the grip and insert foam there, that insulates the user’s hand from the shock of impact and resulting vibration. Using foam inserts also made it feasible for him to redesign the hammer head to increase the effective length of the hammer—and boost momentum transfer by about 15%—without adding weight. In other words, his design not only reduced vibration but made the hammer hit harder with less effort.
These modifications also cut manufacturing costs. Today, Schroder’s design improvements have made their way into the majority of hammers sold in the United States, making hammering much easier on users’ elbows—and relieving manufacturers from the mounting threat of lawsuits for vibration-related workplace injuries.
In the course of tackling the hammer problem, Schroder says, he learned that being an inventor is as much about perseverance and grit as it is about science or imagination. His professors told him he was wasting his time and shouldn’t bother. Then, after he presented his innovations to hammer companies, they said they didn’t think his developments were patentable—yet proceeded to incorporate them into their new designs. Two patents were ultimately issued to Schroder, and 16 years later, after suing the hammer companies, he was finally compensated for his innovations. He paid off his house, took his wife and five kids to Italy, and gave the rest of the proceeds to charity, he says.
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